


Holding On

by azurish



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: (a little bit of fluff maybe anyways?), Angst, Fluff, M/M, Memories, mismatched master/doctor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-12
Updated: 2013-07-12
Packaged: 2017-12-19 06:06:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/880317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurish/pseuds/azurish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Tenth Doctor can't help himself sometimes, but he knows just who can (even if he won't acknowledge why).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Holding On

**Author's Note:**

> So this was written for the following prompt from caerdroia.tumblr.com - 
> 
>  
> 
> **caerdroia asked you:  
> **  
>  Option 1: Doctor/Master, ideally crossing eras. (Five/Simm? Ten/Delgado? Whatever strikes your fancy.)
> 
>  
> 
> ... so a) Caerdroia sends the best fic prompts (... I'm saving Option Two for a rainy day), b) what she probably didn't know is that Ten/Delgado is one of my all-time OTPs, and so c) this got wildly out of hand, whoops.

            The thing about it was … the thing about it was, he _really_ shouldn’t have been doing this.

            The Doctor told himself that he shouldn’t have been doing it because it was a temporal paradox, but that was a lie.  The universe had survived his _interacting_ with his own past selves, after all.  Just _watching_ someone his third regeneration had known (and wasn’t that a nice euphemism) shouldn’t cause any real problems.  He’d never done anything like this before, but the theory seemed sound.  Technically speaking, he was crossing his own timeline, but he had actually timed his visits to Fortress Island so he’d be there when his younger self _wasn’t_ , so it was a small enough snarl in the eddies of time that the TARDIS could sort it all out.  He was lonely, and he distantly knew that his anchors to sanity were fraying away one by one, but he hadn’t yet lost enough control that he would ever intentionally endanger the universe.

            But he told himself that anyways so that he wouldn’t think about the real reasons why he shouldn’t have been spying on this younger regeneration of the Master.

            (He could feel the TARDIS’s disapproval like an itch in the back of his mind, and yes, she’d always been right about him and the Master, even before her own judgment had been clouded by leftover anger about the Master’s cannibalization of her parts for his paradox machine.  He just already had a good tradition of ignoring her when it came to his oldest and best enemy going, and he wasn’t going to abandon it now.)

            Instead he watched as the Master paced his cell and hypnotized and mesmerized and plotted as hard as he could to catch the Doctor’s attention, and every so often, he caught himself smiling.  He relearned the way the Master moved – gracefully, elegantly, with control.  A voice he hadn’t heard for centuries slipped back in through his ears and reactivated old patterns in his auditory cortex.  It all felt so natural; he could almost pretend that all the intervening years hadn’t passed and he was just back stuck on Earth, dueling with a partner who never really managed to score a blow and let him do whatever he wanted.  (He hadn’t appreciated it then – but now he could easily see just how one-sided their encounters must have been.  In some ways, he supposed, that meant the Master had succeeded; he himself had been diverted, distracted, _focused_ on the Master’s ploys, and the Master had been moving the pieces so quickly that the Doctor had never really realized that his intent had never truly been to win, only to maintain the flow of game-play.  Now that he’d seen the Master really trying to win, he knew what the difference was.  He woke up from nightmares even still, sometimes, in which he saw the light in his own Master’s eyes back on the Valiant.)

            It was just watching, the Doctor reminded himself, and so it wasn’t _that_ bad, even if he was visiting Fortress Island so often that pretty soon he was _really_ going to cross his own timeline.  What had started as a whim soon became a regular happenstance.  Every so often, after the kind of day that, ever since Donna had – left, ended with him right on the edge and _desperate_ for someone to talk to, he’d visit and _watch_.  He’d watch and remember this man who had wanted _him_ so desperately, and it eased some of his aches, somehow.  (He refused to examine exactly how.)  He’d even worked out a system to get ever closer – at first he’d just watched from a distance, and then he’d started sneaking around the prison late at night, and now he even had an extra prison guard uniform in his TARDIS’s closet for whenever he needed it.

            And then one day the Master looked sharply at him when he came in with a meal on a tray and he knew the game was up.  The Doctor broke eye contact, ducked slightly, tried to keep his mind totally blank – but it was too late.

            The Master’s hand shot out and caught the Doctor’s wrist, his fingers easily circling all the way around.  Even though the Doctor was still taller, he was much more delicately-built this time around.  The other man’s skin – darker, almost olive – cut a sharp contrast against the Doctor’s own pale white.  The Doctor looked down and pretended he wasn’t trying to memorize the way the other man’s hand looked, grasping his arm just below where his wrist protruded out of his jacket sleeve, or the feel of his fingers squeezing against his pulse.

            “Doctor?” the Master hissed incredulously.  The Doctor didn’t say anything, just tugged ineffectually at his hand and then, when the Master refused to release him, carefully put the metal lunch tray down.  “No, don’t try to hide it,” the Master said, after a few more careful seconds of observation.  “I know you.  You haven’t even tried to hide your mental signature.  It’s very sloppy work.”

            The Doctor shrugged lightly and looked up.  Meeting those burning, dark eyes made him tense up briefly – after all, _seeing_ the intensity of focus in the Master’s gaze was far, far beyond just watching the other man – but he forced a nonchalant expression onto his face.  “I always was rubbish at mental shielding, anyways,” he said, almost airily.  “Oh well.”

            The Master frowned, gave a tiny shake of his head.  “No.  Even you aren’t that sloppy.”

            “Just out of practice,” the Doctor said, and tried a rueful grin.  “You’re not doing a very good job keeping me on my toes in my current time line.”

            The Master’s eyes narrowed and oh _dear_ , that had been a slip, hadn’t it.

            The Doctor had spent most of this regeneration operating on the theory that talking more was always a good strategy, so he rushed on, “I’d’ve thought my mental signature would be too changed by time for you to notice it, anyways.”

            This particular Master had rarely been able to refrain from attempting the kind of innuendo that the Doctor’s words would precede and, true to form, he allowed himself to be distracted this time.  Although there was still something a bit off-balance in the corners of his expression, a slow smile settled on his lips, and he said, “Oh, no, my dear Doctor; your mind barely seems to have aged a day.”  And all right, the Doctor could work with that.  _That_ was familiar.

            “Oh, Master, that’s too kind of you,” he said, and he threw in a brief salacious eyebrow raise of the kind that Jack had mastered before he broke into a grin.  This was the kind of fun he hadn’t had in ages.  (It was a cheap shot to use his name, probably, but under the circumstances the Doctor felt justified.)

            To his surprise, the Master frowned.  “What?”

            “I’m sorry?”

            “You –”  The Master paused.  “You’re usually far less receptive.  What on _Earth_ has happened to make you so … forthcoming?”  He reached forward with one hand towards the Doctor’s forehead, fingers extended towards his temple, but the Doctor shied away.

            “A true gentleman never tells,” the Doctor tried, with a forced laugh.

            And there it was again – that same slight shake of his head.  It wasn’t a gesture the Doctor had already noted down in his mental catalogue of this regeneration’s expressions; it was honest and sharp and just faintly bewildered, and the Doctor found he didn’t like it much.  “Why are you here?”

            “Oh, you know – I just thought I might refresh some old memories.  It’s so easy to lose specifics over the centuries; I thought I could come back and remind myself.”  It was hard to craft a decent lie in response to a question you hadn’t even answered truthfully to yourself, but under the circumstances, the Doctor thought he had done rather well.

            The smile on the Master’s face had all but slipped away and, for the third time, he shook his head almost imperceptibly.  “I thought I brushed up against your mind at least a dozen times this past month.  No, you’ve been here too often for this to be just a trip down memory lane, Doctor,” the Master said.  He tugged the Doctor in closer, smirked when his guess paid off and the Doctor twitched.  Physical proximity – the overbearing sense of the Master’s body just a few inches away (his body temperature colder than the average human’s, perfectly matched against the Doctor’s own), the Master’s scent all around him (dry books and some faintly masculine hair product), the crackle against his mental shielding as the Master’s mind got ever closer – was more overwhelming than the Doctor had expected, and for a moment the Doctor was reeling.  (He could feel a different hand and a different Master pulling him in closer and he didn’t – but then he focused on the other Time Lord’s eyes and grounded himself in the moment.  There were no jagged edges of cruelty there.  The laser-like focus was the same, but the _purpose_ behind it was impossibly different.  This Master wanted to understand, to know, to have; the other Master had wanted to dissect and _own_.)

            “Why are you _really_ here, Doctor?” the Master asked, his voice low and dark and so familiar it felt like home.  He was smiling that familiar, triumphant smirk he wore whenever he felt he’d gotten one up on the Doctor, and between that and how close they were and that hand around his wrist that didn’t _want_ to let him go, well –

            “I missed you,” the Doctor admitted.  “You were – it was always fun, and we – I missed the way we used to spar.”

            The Master blinked, slowly.  It wasn’t the response the Doctor had been expecting.

            “What do you mean?”

            “I – well, you know.  You were always _doing_ things – you know, trying to take over the planet again, calling in aliens you didn’t understand – and trying to get my attention,” and he smiled fondly, the memories all flooding back once again, “and it was all good fun.”

            Something shuttered closed behind the Master’s eyes.  “You know?  I mean, you knew?”

            Flummoxed, the Doctor smiled, uncertainly.  “You were never particularly subtle about it, were you?”

            The Master stepped back as if burned and dropped the Doctor’s hand.  The loss was abrupt.  The Doctor felt suddenly, surprisingly cold.

            “Why don’t you – didn’t you _do_ anything?” the Master hissed.

            “What did you want me to do?” the Doctor asked, and then he reached forward and snagged the Master’s wrist in his own grip, a complete reversal of their earlier position.  The Master’s skin was smooth against his own and the Doctor’s thumb brushed gently, easily against the bones of his wrist.

            The Master gritted his teeth.  His eyes were hungry and his body thrummed with tension, as if he couldn’t decide whether to jump the Doctor right now or force him away.  He said nothing.

            He looked helpless and he looked like he _wanted_ the Doctor, the desire more naked in his brown eyes and in the clench of his jaw and the rapidity of his pulse in his veins than it had ever been before, and that – well.  The Doctor couldn’t resist that, now of all times.

            The answer to his earlier question was far more obvious than the Master had intended.

             His gaze settled on the Master’s lips and the Master saw that, had to see that because he stepped forward right as the Doctor stepped forward and they crashed into each other the middle, hands coming up to tangle in hair and pull and _hold on_ as their lips met.  There was nothing subtle about it – they breathed each other in like drowning men, everything each had been trying to conceal laid bare.  It was impossible to pretend you didn’t need someone when you were molding yourself so closely against him that you practically melded into each other.  One of them moaned and the Doctor’s fingers tightened around the Master’s wrist, pulling him in.  The bristles of the Master’s beard were rough against the Doctor’s face and his hands were just on the edge of painful in the Doctor’s hair, but he felt so _alive_ and so real that the Doctor would be willing to forgive him anything, anything at all –

            And then with a move that was just the natural continuation of a Gallifreyan kiss, the Master reached up for the Doctor’s temples, and the Doctor broke away.  The Master’s gaze was open and hurt for just a moment before he closed off entirely, his expression flickering into a sneer that was just a bit too practiced.

            The Doctor gasped for breath for a moment, held up a hand.  “No, I – sorry, it’s not what you think, but there’s things you can’t know.  Sorry.”

            “I see.”

            Silence for a moment.  The mood was shattered; the Doctor’s reaction had been too unpleasant a reminder of the strange circumstances of their meeting.  The Doctor sighed and ran a distracted hand through his mussed hair.  “I just wish –” he began, and made an abortive little step towards the Master.

            But the man in front of him stepped back and the Doctor stopped as if struck.  “This was a foolish idea in the first place, Doctor.  You’re from our future.  We cannot – proceed.”

            The Doctor sighed.  “Yeah.”

            “I shall know if you come back,” the Master said, stiffly.  “Spare us both the trouble … please.”

            The Doctor might have protested, but the last word pulled him up short.  (And what was the world coming to, that the _Master_ was the one with the restraint to champion the sensible course?)  He smothered down the words that had been rising up in his throat – ‘Would you deny _both_ of us what we need?’ ‘You want this as much as I.’ – and instead nodded.  “I’m sorry.”

            The Master sighed, raised a hand to massage his own temples.  “Indeed.  I would tell you that that a simple apology cannot possibly atone for the enormity of the facts you’ve just revealed – that you _do_ know exactly what I am doing, that your present regeneration is _toying_ with me, Doctor – but from your present state, I take it that our positions have been reversed in the future?”

            The Doctor started to lie, but the Master cut him off.  “You don’t have to confirm or deny the future.  But I can hardly be angry with _this_ regeneration of yours, at least, when I can see that you’re experiencing the same, ah, problems that I am.”

            The Doctor offered a true rueful grin, which was a bit harder around the edges than his earlier attempt.  “Well, I do feel the need to put in a good word for my past self – he – I wasn’t as bad as all _that_.  I just didn’t know how to respond.  I was young and I didn’t know what it was like, to – what I mean is, I didn’t realize.”  He shrugged.  “I’m sorry I was an idiot?”

            The Master folded his hands neatly in front of him.  “I suppose in turn that I ought to tell you that no matter what happens in the future, I can’t imagine a regeneration of mine that didn’t, ah, _want_ you.”

            (Unbidden, the feeling of the Master’s dead weight in the Doctor’s arms sprung to his mind and he winced.  He didn’t think about that day very often, because there was so much he wanted to _forget_ – )

            The younger Master in front of him reached forward to adjust the Doctor’s lapel brusquely, a move that pulled him abruptly back into the present and was so startlingly kind that the Doctor was suddenly, breathlessly grateful.  “Thank you,” he said, quietly.

            “Think nothing of it, Doctor.”  The Master said.  He pulled away.  “And now, if you’ll please excuse me, I have a plan I really ought to be setting in motion.”

            “Right.  Well, I’ll see you shortly – or rather, _I_ won’t, but _I_ will, if you know what I mean.”  A sudden memory of another time, so long ago, when he’d been in even closer physical proximity to this regeneration flashed through his mind.  He remembered the metallic taste of the air in the bunker and the Master’s body flush against his own as he worked out his plan to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow and he could feel a tiny grin growing.  That _had_ been a fun adventure.  “Give the old boy a chance this time, will you?  I’m sure the two of you can work something out …”

            The skin by the Master’s eyes crinkled just slightly with a suppressed smile.  “Doctor, I believe you should leave now before you accidentally reveal the future to me and unwind the fabric of the universe.  Not that I would complain, after all; it seems that you’ve begun to take after me in your old age.”

            The Doctor tried to quirk an eyebrow but that statement seemed to hit just a bit too close to the truth for comfort.  “Well.  I’ll be on my way, then,” he said, and he pretended that he wasn’t stalling for time at all.

            “Indeed.”  The Master inclined his head, and then he turned away.  His steps just a bit too measured to be entirely natural, he walked away from the Doctor and sat down in front of the lunch tray.

            The Doctor watched him for a moment longer, and then he forced himself to turn on his heel and walk out of that room.

            He strode through the corridors of the Fortress Island prison, memorizing one last time the look of the walls and the smell of damp concrete in the air and the way the whole facility had looked (and really, it _had_ been the setting for one of his fondest memories), before he reached the TARDIS, tucked away in a supply closet.

            “Here we go, old girl, then,” he said.  “We won’t be coming back after this.”  She rumbled happily and he offered her a wan little smile.  “Let’s try – somewhere new.  Somewhere different.”  And he set the coordinates randomly and he tried not to reach out and brush against the Master’s mind once more as he left Fortress Island for the final time, because it would be like picking at a scab or prodding the hole left by a missing tooth.

            He really shouldn’t have come here at all in the first place, anyways, he reminded himself, as he ran his fingers idly across the inside of his wrist.


End file.
